This shot has a few elements. The main point of interest is the group of five spires, which balance with the little spire all by itself on the right. There is a line across the top, while the image fades to black at the bottom.

I knew that setting the lens wide-open at f/2 would add vignetting, drawing your eyes to the brighter spires in the center, and keeping them from wandering off the image at the darker edges.

Since I was using a camera with a separate viewfinder window, I wasn't smart enough to realize that there was a yellow leaf behind the smaller spire, which interferes with it. I was smart enough to use f/2 to throw it all out of focus. If I was shooting a digital camera, I would have noticed that back when I could do something about it.

If I had shot this on any SLR, like a $20 Nikon EM with a Nikon Series E 50mm f/1.8, I would have gotten better results because I would have been able to see what I was doing. This is why LEICAs went obsolete in the 1960s.

I used an orange 85C filter to make the image warmer, or in this case, more golden. The 85C (a.k.a. A8) filter on daylight film is the same as setting a digital camera to about 10,000K (roughly "shade") white balance.

I bracketed by adding a few stops from the meter reading. Oddly the meter was right, which read f/4.7 to f/5.6 at 1 second.

I cropped this a bit in in Photoshop CS4, but more importantly, I played with a curves adjustment layer to get it to look right, and I also used the Lens Distortion Correction Tool to straighten out the flagpole, which tilted-in a bit because I had my camera tilted up. With Photoshop's distortion tools, I don't need to futz with a view camera's movements, at least for web use.